French philosophy

French philosophy is philosophy in the French language and by French people. It has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.

Medieval period

The Romanization of Gaul and subsequent Gallo-Roman culture brought Latin to France. Cassiodorus (ca. 490–585) cites in his book Variae VIII, 12, 7 (dated 526) from a letter to king Athalaric: "Finally you found Roman eloquence in regions that were not originally its own; and there the reading of Cicero rendered you eloquent where once the Gaulish language resounded."

Medieval philosophy was very much a part of Christian philosophy. Ratramnus (d. c. 868) defended Gottschalk of Orbais' views on double predestination, a controversy throughout Francia in the 9th century.

The Benedictine monk of Marmoutier Abbey and empiricist Gaunilo is well known for his objection to Saint Anselm of Canterbury's (1033 – 1109) ontological argument for the existence of God found in Anselm's Proslogion. In Gaunilo's work In Behalf of the Fool, Gaunilo contends as a reductio that the same argument proves the existence of "the most perfect island". Lanfranc and Saint Anselm were Benedictine monks at Bec Abbey.

Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) was a leading proponent of philosophical realism and helped to pioneer biblical hermeneutics. Gilbert de la Porrée (d. 1154) was one of his followers.

Roscellinus

Roscellinus (c. 1050 – c. 1121) defended nominalism. In Roscellinus's theory, the universal is merely an emission of sound (flatus vocis). Among Roscellinus' supporters was Raimbert of Lille. Raimbert's nominalism was attacked by Odo of Tournai (1060–1113).

Roscellinus further maintained that the three persons of the Trinity were not referred to as three substances or Gods only by convention, arguing that if they were really one substance then God the Father and the Holy Spirit would have become incarnate along with God the Son. Roscellinus cited Lanfranc and St. Anselm in support of this doctrine. In 1092/1093, however, a council convoked at Soissons by the archbishop of Reims condemned his interpretation and accused Roscellinus of tritheism. Roscellinus recanted his theological beliefs, but later returned to professing them.

Chartres

The cathedral school at Chartres promoted scholarship and Platonism. Scholars included Bernard (d. c. 1125) and Thierry (d. c. 1150) of Chartres, and Gilbert of Poitiers (c. 1086 –1154). These men were at the forefront of an intellectual climate now known as the twelfth-century Renaissance, pioneering the Scholastic philosophy that came to dominate medieval thinking throughout Europe.

Peter Abelard

Abelard with Héloïse

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician who taught at the cathedral schools of Paris. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century". He wrote Sic et Non and fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing. Abelard was also expelled by Anselm of Laon, and clashed with his master William of Champeaux. The story of Abelard's affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary.

He helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle. It was at this time that the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of Aristotle, first came to be available in the schools. Abelard distinguished between de dicto modal sentences and de re modal sentences. Abelard also defended conceptualism on the problem of universals. Abelard further showed a great interest in ethics.

Pope Innocent III accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo, which amended Augustine of Hippo's Doctrine of Original Sin. The Vatican accepted the view that unbaptized babies did not, as at first believed, go straight to Hell but to a special area of limbo, "limbus infantium". They would therefore feel no pain but no supernatural happiness either (only natural) because, it was held, they would not be able to see the deity that created them.

His lectures attracted students from across Europe in numbers that helped prepare the foundation of the University of Paris a few decades after his death. Italian philosopher and Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas taught at Paris.

Condemnation of 1277

The Condemnations of 1210–1277 at the Sorbonne deemed Aristotle's Physics to be heresy, opening the door to modern science. Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia have been singled out as the most prominent targets of the 1277 censure. These two scholars were proponents of the Averroist movement.

The enigmatic Gerard of Brussels probably published his pioneering study of kinematics Liber de motu (On Motion) some time in the 13th century.

Llullism

Ramon Llull visited Paris in the 1280s and Llullism became popular. Llulism is a belief in the unity of Christianity influenced by such thinkers as neoplatonist Dionysius the Areopagite.

Jean Buridan

Jean Buridan

Jean Buridan (c. 1301 – c. 1360) was a French philosopher and nominalist most famous for Buridan's ass and developing the theory of impetus. Buridan was also considered one of the foremost logicians of the later Middle Ages. For 200 years after Buridan's discussions, little was said about syllogistic logic. Nicole Oresme (1325 – 1382) studied with him.

Nicholas of Autrecourt

The skeptical views of Nicholas of Autrecourt (c. 1299 – 1369) were condemned as heresy in 1347. Nicholas of Autrecourt rejected both the notion of causality and the Aristotelian ideas of substance theory.

Raymond Sebond

University of Toulouse professor Raymond Sebond (1385 – 1436) attempted to reconcile reason and faith. Raymond declares that the Book of Nature and the Bible are both divine revelations.

16th century

Humanism

Italian Renaissance humanist Gregory of Tifernas was the first teacher of Greek in France at the University of Paris in 1458. French Renaissance humanist Rabelais (c. 1490 – 1553) contributed to French philosophy in Gargantua and Pantagruel a belief in man uncorrupted by institutions, and ridiculed Pyrrhonism in the third book (1546).

Reformation

Petrus Ramus

France also saw a Protestant movement following the Reformation, such as the Huguenots, which included precursors in such philosophers as Llullist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455 – c. 1536). Jean Bodin (c. 1530 – 1596) was critical of papal authority.

Ramism

Logician Petrus Ramus (1515 – 1572) criticized Aristotle, writing Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse (Everything that Aristotle has said is false) (1536). The Dialogues (1557) of Ramist Guy De Bruès (b. c. 1530) were influential for entertaining skepticism. Ramus was a Protestant convert and a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572.

The first writings on Ramism after the death of Ramus included biographies, and were by disciples of sorts: Freigius (1574 or 1575), Banosius (1576), and Nancelius (1599). Followers of Ramus in different fields included Johannes Althusius, Caspar Olevianus, John Milton, Johannes Piscator, Rudolph Snellius and Hieronymus Treutler. Ramism also had a long-lasting influence in New England.

Skepticism

Henri Estienne (1531 – 1598) was responsible for the first printed Latin translation of the works of Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus in 1562.

Montaigne

Montaigne became famous for his skepticism.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) was famous for skepticism, summed up in his personal motto of Que sais-je? ("what do I know?") His work consists of essays (he coined the term) filled with autobiographical and casual anecdotes. His writing style came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. Montaigne's best known skeptical essay is the Apology for Raymond Sebond, which recapitulates much from Sextus Empiricus.

Charron

Montaigne's follower was the Parisian Pierre Charron (1541 – 1603), notable for De la sagesse (On Wisdom), which argued that ethics could be separated from religion. Charron also wrote Les Trois Vérités (The Three Truths), in which Charron sought to prove that there is a God and a true religion, that the true religion is Christianity, and that the true church is Roman Catholicism.

Sanches

University of Toulouse professor Francisco Sanches (c. 1550 –1623) published Quod nihil scitur (That Nothing Is Known) in 1581.

17th century

René Descartes

René Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy.

Modern philosophy began in France with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). He studied at the Jesuit school La Flèche and was a pioneer of the Scientific Revolution. He founded a both mechanistic and dualist philosophy known as Cartesianism, supported in works like Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method.

It is often said Descartes changed the primary object of philosophical thought from ontology to epistemology. Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the spread of skepticism. Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences could be placed and progressively built. Thus he doubted anything which appeared uncertain and decided to only accept certain or apodeictic knowledge as truth.

After invoking the possibility of dreaming and further of an omnipotent deceiver to reject the external world, the information given to him from his senses, mathematics and logic, Descartes discovered at least one thing could be known for certain. If he himself was doubting, then he had to exist. Thus Cogito Ergo Sum—I think, therefore I am. This became his first principle.

Descartes then claimed that because he discovered the Cogito through perceiving it "clearly and distinctly", anything he can similarly perceive as clearly and distinctly must be true. Then he argues that he can conceive of an infinite being, but finite beings cannot produce infinite ideas and hence an infinite being must have put the idea into his mind. He uses this argument, commonly known as an ontological argument, to invoke the existence of an omni-benevolent God as the indubitable foundation that makes all sciences possible.

Many people admired Descartes intentions, but were unsatisfied with this solution. Some accused him of circularity, proclaiming his ontological argument uses his definition of truth as a premise, while his proof of his definition of truth uses his ontological argument as a premise. Hence the problems of solipsism, truth and the existence of the external world came to dominate 17th century western thought.

A scene of Desargues, Mersenne, Pascal, and Descartes.

Another famous problem arises from Descartes’ substance dualism. For Descartes, a substance is that which can be conceived independent of everything else and exist independent of anything else. Since Descartes conceived of the mind independent of everything else when doubting everything uncertain, and because if he wanted to God could produce a world in which only the mind existed, he came to define the mind as a different substance from that of body. For Descartes, the mind is defined as an unextended substance and the body as an extended substance. This raised the fundamental question of how it is possible that mind and body interact with one another.

Cartesianism attracted several followers such as Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, who was a solitaire. Together they produced the Port-Royal Logic, the "most influential logic book after Aristotle and before the end of the nineteenth century".

Marin Mersenne

The Minim Marin Mersenne (1588 – 1648) joined Descartes in arguing against skepticism. Mersenne was "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of the 1600s" and, because of his ability to make connections between people and ideas, "the post-box of Europe".

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was a Cartesian and a child prodigy mathematician and scientist who grew increasingly religious. Pascal was a vacuuist who repeated the mercury barometric mercury experiments of Evangelista Torricelli, while Descartes was a plenist who held "nature abhors a vacuum".

Pascal is known for defending Jansenism in Provincial Letters. Pascal was also a fideist. His aphoristic collection Pensées is a name given posthumously to fragments that Pascal had been preparing of an apology for Christianity, which was never completed. Pensées contains Pascal's Wager, known as "the discourse on the machine" in the original.

Nicolas Malebranche

One solution to the mind–body problem came from Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Malebranche maintained that created substances of a different kind cannot interact with one another. In fact, he believed substances of the same kind could not interact either because no necessary causation could be perceived. He proposes then that it is God, an uncreated substance, who brings it about that each time one perceives a 'cause', one also perceives an 'effect'. Hence the doctrine is named occasionalism.

Malebranche was well-known and celebrated in his own time, but has since become somewhat of an obscure figure in the history of western philosophy. His philosophy had a profound effect on it, however, through its influence upon Spinoza and Hume, whose problem of causation was influenced by Malebranche’s occasionalism.

Pierre Gassendi

The most influential anti-Cartesian in France was Pierre Gassendi (1592 – 1655), who sought to revive Epicureanism. Richard Popkin indicates that Gassendi was one of the first thinkers to formulate the modern "scientific outlook". Gassendi famously tracked the transit of Mercury in 1631.

Another influential critic of Descartes was churchman Pierre Daniel Huet (1630 – 1721).

Pierre Bayle

Pierre Bayle (1647 – 1706) was a Huguenot who fled to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He advanced skepticism in his Historical and Critical Dictionary. Bayle's discussion of the problem of evil inspired the German philosopher Leibniz (1646 – 1716), who wrote in Latin and French, to publish his Théodicée. Leibniz was an optimist who believed God made the best of all possible worlds.

18th century

French philosophy in the 18th century was deeply political. It was heavily imbued with Enlightenment principles and many of its philosophers became critics of church and state and promoters of rationality and progress. These philosophers would come to have a deep influence on the politics and ideologies of both the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

Montesquieu

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) was a social commentator and political philosopher. His theories deeply influenced the American Founders. His belief that the state powers be separated into legislative, executive, and judicial branches formed the basis for separation of powers under the United States Constitution. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu outlined the view that man and societies are influenced by climate. He believed that hotter climates create hot-tempered people and colder climates aloof people, whereas the mild climate of France is ideal for political systems.

Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694–1778), came to embody the Enlightenment with his criticisms of Church dogma and French institutions, his defense of civil liberties and his support of social reform. He fought for the right to a free trial and freedom of religion. Voltaire was a deist, and was twice sentenced to prison, and once to temporary exile to England.

A heavy influence on the Enlightenment was the work of British natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of Newtonianism, who published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1686, which included his laws of motion, introducing classical mechanics in physics.

Voltaire and mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, helping to popularize Newtonianism in France alongside Pierre Louis Maupertuis. Voltaire's Letters on the English introduced French readers to the philosophy of the British empiricists like Newton and John Locke, as well as to playwright William Shakespeare. Influenced by Locke and Voltaire, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) founded the philosophy of sensationalism. Idéologues Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, and Pierre Laromiguière were followers of Condillac.

Voltaire is best remembered today for his aphorisms and his satire of Leibniz known as Candide, written soon after the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, which tells the tale of a young believer in Leibnizian optimism who becomes disillusioned after a series of hardships.

Voltaire's anonymously published Philosophical Dictionary was censored in many countries, including Switzerland (Geneva) and France, where all available copies of the book were collected and burned in the town square.

Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) distinguished himself from the progressive scientism of the Enlightenment with his proclamation in Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that art and science are corruptors of human morality. Furthermore, he caused controversy with his theory that man is good by nature but corrupted by society, in contradiction to the Christian doctrine of original sin.

Rousseau's The Social Contract asserts that only the general will of the people has the right to legislate. It famously begins “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Upon publication, the distribution of The Social Contract in France was prohibited, and Rousseau fled the country to avoid imprisonment.

However it influenced the French Revolution. Rousseau was so highly praised by the French revolutionists that in 1794 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris. Rousseau's Emile became the basis of a new national system of education. His picture was the only one to grace the home of German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Some of his theories continue to be controversial, such as his idea of the general will, which has been accused of both fascism and socialism. His critique of private property in works like Discourse on Inequality has been seen as a forebear to Marxist ideology.

Diderot

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was a key collaborator in the creation of the Encyclopédia, with mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert and publisher André Le Breton. A systematic collection of all the information of the arts and sciences, the Encyclopédia caused great controversy. Diderot was harassed repeatedly by the police, and was even arrested. The ecclesiastical party disliked the Encyclopédia, which was a threat to the aristocracy because it asserted that the state should take care of the people and not itself, religious freedom, freedom of thought and the value of science and industry. In the end, Le Breton began removing all articles he deemed controversial in fear of punishment. The Encyclopédia that Diderot had worked on for twenty years was ruined beyond repair.

Revolution

The French Revolution was opposed to the Church. Revolutionaries like Antoine-François Momoro supported the atheistic Cult of Reason, and Maximilien Robespierre started the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, which formed the provisional government and war cabinet during the Reign of Terror.

19th century

The philosophy of French revolutionary Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) birthed Saint-Simonianism which believed in science's ability to transform society, in works such as his Introduction to scientific discoveries of the 19th century (1803) and his Notes on the study of man (1813), the latter of which is a eulogy to Napoleon.

Eclecticism

Victor Cousin

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) was leader of the Doctrinaires group during the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830). He brought the influence of Scottish common sense realism to France, shown in his pupil Victor Cousin (1792–1867). Cousin had also learned under Laromiguière, and was influenced by Kant and German idealism as well. Cousin is the founder of eclecticism.

Spiritualism

French spiritualism was influenced by Maine de Biran (1766–1824), who at first was a follower of Condillac, but became a mystical theosophist. Félix Ravaisson-Mollien (1813–1900) and Jules Lachelier (1832–1918) were also influenced by German idealism but distinguished their views from Cousin's, preferring what is called spiritualism. Lachelier taught Jules Lagneau and Émile Boutroux, who was a critic of materialism in science.

Socialism and anarchism

Saint-Simon influenced the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and his system of Fourierism. Fourier was an influence on the anarchism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865). Proudhon published the Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère (The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty) in 1846, which prompted a book-length critique from Karl Marx entitled The Poverty of Philosophy, commencing a rift between anarchism and Marxism and anarchists and Marxists that would be continued by the followers of Russian Mikhail Bakunin and collectivist anarchists in the First International and that lasts to this day.

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte was the founder of sociology and positivism.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a philosopher born in Montpellier. He was the founder of the discipline of sociology and the doctrine of positivism, and may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.

A student of Fourier strongly influenced by Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social paradigm based on the sciences. Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.

Comte attempted to introduce a cohesive "religion of humanity" which, though largely unsuccessful, was influential in the development of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. He also created and defined the term "altruism".

His student Charles Renouvier was a German idealist. Sociology pioneer Émile Durkheim read Comte and Renouvier.

Comte was also of considerable influence in 19th century thought outside of France, impacting the work of thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill.

20th century

Main article: Twentieth-century French philosophy

French philosophy in the 20th century saw the rise of many schools of thought, including philosophy of science and phenomenology. French phenomenology was presented in a Cartesian format and influenced by German thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Phenomenology was consistently noticeable throughout the 20th century, whereas existentialism spread throughout the west and gained fame, only to die out somewhat with the advent of structuralism, which came to be seen as merely a necessary means of access to post-structuralism, while postmodern thought came to dominate the late 20th century.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure founded linguistics, semiotics and structuralism.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist who taught for many years in Paris. He was concerned with distinguishing linguistics from philology by moving from the study of the history of individual words and comparisons of languages to the study of the essential underlying structures of language. His small output of work, such as the Course in General Linguistics (1916), most of which was published posthumously, became the foundations of linguistics, semiotics and structuralism, the school of philosophy concerned with the underlying structures which form, limit and affect society, language and the human mind.

Saussure divided language into two parts: the langue, which is the system of signs and rules owned by a community, and parole, the individual acts of speech within the given community. This was likened by Saussure to chess and a game of chess, for before anyone can play, they have to know the rules and structure of the game.

For Saussure, the essential unit of any language is the word, or sign. Like language, he divides the word into two inseparable parts: the signifier, which is the sound image, and the signified, which is the concept associated with the signifier. Saussure stressed the arbitrariness of this association, maintaining that any signifier can refer to any signified. How a sign obtains its meaning is by what it is not within the langue, not what it is. For example, the word ‘dog’ means dog simply because it does not mean cat, bird or cornflakes.

For Saussure, language can be studied synchronically, i.e. as a complete system within a frozen moment of time, or it can be studied diachronically, which is the examination of its historical development. It can be said that structuralists focused on the synchronic aspects of culture, while poststructuralists, as a reaction toward the highly dualistic and deterministic characteristics, focussed on the diachronic aspects of culture in an attempt to invoke a grey area.

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson would play a major part in shaping 20th century thought.

While Ferdinand de Saussure was a relatively obscure thinker in his time, it may be said that Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was somewhat of a celebrity. His philosophy appealed both to academics and the general public. Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". Although Bergson was a major influence on early 20th century thought, interest in his work greatly decreased after World War II. In the late 20th century came a revitalization of interest in Bergson’s oeuvre, through the works of self-proclaimed Bergsonian Gilles Deleuze.

All of Bergson’s works were concerned with his theory of real time as it is experienced by consciousness. He coined the term élan vital, in works like Creation Evolution (1907), and was the French representative of Lebensphilosophie.

Bergson believed substance pluralism and substance monism are in fact just two representations of the same phenomenon. He sought to improve on Lachelier, and the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and has likened consciousness to the rolling and unrolling of thread, to represent man’s sense of mortality and the continual gain of new memory. However, these images are insufficient and can only show the idea indirectly. Bergson maintains that the case is the same for any other image of the idea one can produce.

Bergson calls this idea Duration and defines it as being qualitative, not quantitative, unextended, not extended, a multiplicity yet a unity, mobile and continuously interpenetrating itself. However, it should be warned that Bergson believes Duration cannot be represented by concepts either. Bergson calls the creation of concepts analysis and believes it can never represent the absolute. He likens it to constructing a model of a city out of a collection of photographs taken from every angle and a poem being translated and having commentary piled upon commentary: the model of the city can never replicate the feeling of being in the city itself and the translation and commentaries can never give the simple dimensional value of walking in the city itself. Indeed, symbols always distort the part of an object they represent through generalization to include it and every other objects’ part they represent. The Duration can only be grasped through intuition. Intuition is a complete philosophical method that involves placing oneself within the Duration.

Writers outside of French philosophy influenced by Bergson include the novelist Marcel Proust, American philosopher William James, and British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

Philosophy of science

Henri Poincaré

Pierre Duhem

Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. In France, philosophy of science, also known as French historical epistemology or French epistemology, was a prominent school of thought with Henri Poincaré, Émile Meyerson, Pierre Duhem, Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Jules Vuillemin, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, and Jean-Michel Berthelot.

Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) had views on the philosophy of mathematics opposite to those of analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, who believed that mathematics was a branch of logic. Poincaré strongly disagreed, claiming that intuition was the life of mathematics. Poincaré's view is known as pre-intuitionism or conventionalism, a view he also carried into the philosophy of science. His views are found in the book Science and Hypothesis (1902).

Thermodynamicist Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) introduced the Duhem thesis, an early form of confirmation holism. Duhem also sought to revise the history of science and contributed to the history of medieval science with the ten volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (The System of World: A History of Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus), beginning in 1913.

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique and rupture épistémologique).

Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944) was specialized in philosophy of science concerned with the axiomatic method, formalism, set theory and mathematical logic.

Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) introduced the concept of the philosophy of algebra and was specialized in philosophy of knowledge.

Philosophical anthropology

Marc Augé (1935–2023) was a French anthropologist who explored the philosophical potential of "non-places". For Augé a place is relational, historical, and concerned with identity and a space without those qualities in a non-place. Examples of non-places would be airports, gas stations, and shopping malls.

Alain

Alain (1868–1951) was taught by Lagneau, and himself taught Simone Weil and Georges Canguilhem.

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist who greatly influenced 20th century philosophy including influencing Pope Paul VI. Her notable ideas include decreation (renouncing the gift of free will as a form of acceptance of everything that is independent of one's particular desires; making "something created pass into the uncreated"), uprootedness (déracinement), obligations as the basis of rights, attention as compassion, patriotism of compassion, abolition of political parties, the unjust character of affliction (malheur), and that compassion must act in the area of metaxy.

Sorelianism

Georges Sorel

The revolutionary syndicalist, and friend of anarchist Fernand Pelloutier, Georges Sorel (1847–1922) founded Sorelianism. Sorel was an advocate of violence and a believer in the power of myth, who wrote Reflections on Violence (1908). He was influenced by Proudhon and Bergson's Lebensphilosophie.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology can be defined as a way of philosophizing which involves descriptive explanations of phenomena as it is given to consciousness and how it is given to consciousness, which attempts to avoid imposed explanations. In France, phenomenology was influenced by Lebensphilosophie and seen as a radical Cartesianism which rejected substance dualism to better understand consciousness. Phenomenology is still an important area of research in France today. It also influenced existentialism and many postmodern philosophers' thought.

Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) was one of the first to introduce phenomenology to France, through his translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Lévinas considered ethics primary in philosophy and once proclaimed that it precedes metaphysics and should be considered the first philosophy. He developed a moral philosophy based around notions of the other and the face which introduced ethics into phenomenology, which had been missing since the demise of Max Scheler.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was concerned with the foundations of perception. His theory of the subject-body was produced as an alternative to Descartes' Cogito and substance dualism. In contrast to the clear distinction between the mind and the external world, where the latter is but an extension of the former, the subject-body is an existential account of the pre-reflective subject, the subject's perception and the world as intricately intertwined.

Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was one of the first to introduce phenomenology to France. He was best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. He was awarded the Kyoto prize in arts and philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.

Existentialism and Absurdism

Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism was a prominent school of thought in the first half of the 20th century. Traditionally, existentialism is concerned with the human condition, exploring such topics as purpose, freedom and the experience of the other. It can trace its roots back to philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, as well as Lebensphilosophie, but bloomed with the thought of French phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) saw his existentialism as drawing all the conclusions from a consistent line of atheism. He was a spokesman for a generation, but his influence waned with the advent of structuralism. His major thesis is that existence precedes essence, first stated in Existentialism Is a Humanism. With a material object, such as a knife, an artisan devises an essence, such as that of slicing bread, and then produces an object whose purpose it is to fulfil its essence. However, without God, there is no artisan who developed the essence of man for a purpose. So man is born free, thrown into the world where sole responsibility for his actions rests on his shoulders, then through his actions he defines the essence of not only himself, but of what he believes man ought to be. The denial of this responsibility through excuses is what Sartre termed bad faith. Sartre responded to Heidegger's Being and Time with Being and Nothingness. He also wrote the novel Nausea about alienation. His play No Exit is the source of the quote "Hell is other people."

Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960), winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, rejected being labelled an existentialist, preferring to be called an absurdist. In the opening pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, he states what he considers to be the fundamental question of philosophy: is suicide the correct response to an absurd world? Likening a Godless life to the story of Sisyphus, where he is doomed forever to push a rock up a hill only for it to roll down again, Camus’ answer is "No. It requires revolt. [...] The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Camus also wrote The Stranger, ranked greatest book of the 20th Century by Le Monde.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was an existential feminist. Beauvoir believed that men had surrounded women in a false aura of mystery, stereotyping them into "the other" and an underclass, as an excuse for not understanding them and dominating them. But Beauvoir maintains that Sartre’s thesis (that is, existence precedes essence) applies to women as much as it does to men and that through their choices and actions, women can transcend this aura and reject being the underclass.

Structuralism

Jacques Lacan

French Structuralism finds its roots in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was concerned with linguistics. But soon structuralism began to be applied to anthropology, social sciences and psychology. Structuralism played a major role in intellectual thought after World War Two, where it rejected existential concepts of freedom for the idea of man as determined by structures in the thought of such thinkers as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. However, by the end of the century it became perceived as important not for itself, but for the schools of thought it produced, such as poststructuralism and deconstruction. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) applied Saussure’s structuralism to anthropology, specifically in the topic of intermarriage between tribes.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a literary critic and semiologist who applied Saussure’s thought to literary theory. In Mythologies, Barthes explored articles, advertisements, movies, etc. to demonstrate the deep-seated bourgeois propaganda found within. He described these myths as second-order signs. A certain form of green bottles signify red wine. The bourgeois then assign a second signifier to this signifier, that of relaxing, healthy, strong wine, be it to sell products or uphold the status quo.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a psychoanalyst who sought to explain the mind in terms of structures both in order to correct perceived errors in Freud’s thought as well as errors in the subsequent interpretation of Freud through the theories of Saussure, Strauss and Barthes. Lacan was also influenced by German philosophers Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel, through Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, and Karl Marx.

Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and his colleagues, prominently including Étienne Balibar, reworked Marxism using insights from structuralism, against the so-called "humanist" trend in Sartrean and Western Marxisms. Althusser offered an influential new reading of Marx's work, describing an "epistemological break" between the young, Hegelian Marx and the late Marx of Das Kapital. With his focus on the economic level and theory, Althusser came into conflict with social historians, such as E. P. Thompson.

Poststructuralism and postmodernism

Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Photograph by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995.

The second half of the 20th century saw the rise of so-called postmodern thought. This rise was especially noticeable in France. However, the term is fairly hard to define. In fact, some people maintain that it is nothing but a slur applied to a group of disparate philosophers wrongly grouped together. However, it can also be seen as a critique of traditional western thought, particularly dichotomies and the belief in progress, influenced heavily by structuralism, phenomenology and existentialism.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) defined postmodernism as scepticism toward metanarratives. A metanarrative is a kind of grand arching story that encompasses—and claims to predict—everything. An example is Marxism, which explains the communist as the inevitable historical synthesis of the proletariat and capitalist of modern capitalist class division. Lyotard considered the metanarrative an essential feature of modernity. Hence the postmodern condition is the replacement of metanarratives with a multiplicity of micro-narratives, or to call them the appellation Lyotard gave them, language games. Lyotard maintained that these language games lack any all-embracing structure but were brought about by technological developments in such fields as communication and mass media making metanarratives indefensible.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) maintained a similar scepticism about absolutes, such as right and wrong, sane and insane, and human nature. His method was not to deny such notions, but to historicize them, examining what in the supposedly necessary may be contingent, and demonstrating the relationships between knowledge and politics, power and knowledge. His main fields of investigation were psychiatry, medicine and disciplinary institutions. Foucault was anti-Hegelian and anti-teleological in his historical excavations. Through his examinations of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization, he showed that the development of psychiatry was not an obvious improvement on previous treatments of the insane, and that furthermore, the apparent scientific neutrality of psychiatric treatments hides the fact that they are a form of controlling defiance of bourgeois society.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed deconstruction as a response to structuralism. Deconstruction takes a text, examines binary oppositions within it from several different interpreting standpoints, and then attempts to show them to be dependent upon one another, unstable, ambiguous and historically and culturally defined. Through showing the fluidity of the dichotomies, deconstruction shows the fluidity of the text. Derrida maintained that no meaning is stable, not even the dichotomies classical philosophers took for granted. Through an internal logic, the text deconstructs itself and hence allows highly original interpretations.

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was concerned with the concealment of the fact that there are no truths in a given field. He termed this concealment simulacra. An example he gives is the Borges story of an Empire that creates a map which was so accurate that it laid over and covered the entire city it mapped. The map grew when the Empire grew, and decayed when the empire decayed. When the empire was destroyed, the only object left was the map. For Baudrillard, people live in the map and hence reality crumbles because of misuse. Eventually, the difference between reality and illusion becomes indistinguishable for the consciousness. Baudrillard called this hyperreality. An example of this is reality television, which is dependent on the watcher embracing it to create the illusion that it mirrors reality.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) developed a philosophy of difference which valued the simulacrum higher than the idea and its copy, which is an inversion of Plato’s method, which held the idea and its copy in high esteem and neglected the simulacrum. He saw difference as prior to identity and reason as not all-encompassing, but a little haven built in the duration of difference-in-itself. He likened it to Christianity, where if you accept original sin and immaculate conception, then it all makes sense. Deleuze also developed a constructivist view of philosophy as the job of developing concepts, just like it is the poet’s job to produce poems and the painter’s job to paint paintings. For these reasons, Deleuze developed an idiosyncratic way of reading philosophers which he once referred to as buggery. He would use them as stepping stones for creating new concepts which appear to belong to the philosopher he’s reading, but are utterly different. An example is that of Spinoza, whom Deleuze read as an empiricist.

Hélène Cixous (born 1937) developed a feminist interpretation of post-structuralism most influenced by Derrida. She argued that patriarchal cultures build male domination into their language and literary canon, and that a feminist revolution must account for this. She urged female writers to adopt deconstructionist methods and forward their own vision of life as a woman.

Luce Irigaray (born 1930) is also a feminist, post-structuralist. She was ostracized by the followers of Lacan. She is considered one of the founders of French difference feminism.

See also

• List of French philosophers
• Non-philosophy
• Speculative realism

External links

• The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française (archived 23 July 2011)